The Journey Continues: Skeptical Inquiries into Family Cinema- Wreck-It-Ralph/Big Hero 6

Wreck-It Ralph-Big Hero 6


In my last installment of this series I talked about the current state of Disney; about the poor state of the studio’s output during the 2000s and what they were trying to do to solve it.  In particular, I focused on Disney’s doubling down on their “Princess” brand; the way they noticed the appeal of the princess as a figure of great interest amongst little girls and how they increased their marketing efforts around them and then added to their library of princesses with new films providing modernized versions of the characters.  These films were massive successes, but they were hardly uncharted territory for the company, they simply took an audience that the company already had (little girls) and found new ways to reach (or, less charitably, exploit) that audience.  The other more challenging goal that the company has long had was to finally reach another audience that they aren’t so sure they have a grasp of, little boys.  This is a market that has proven elusive to Disney (and the wider entertainment industry) for years if not decades, and it has never been a secret.

Looking back I feel like my own experience seemed to back up this situation.  I’m not sure why I didn’t notice it before but it’s interesting that the two movies that came out during the window in which I was going to see their films in theaters as a child just happened to be the most masculine success stories out of the Disney Renaissance: Aladdin and The Lion King. But when they put out their next film, Pocahontas, I instantly became less interested.  Part of why I skipped that film had to do with the fact that my parents thought the film was disrespectful to Native Americans, but I have a hunch that if I was really truly pumped to see the film I would have talked them into it, but because I thought it was “for girls” I wasn’t going to fight their verdict.  By the time they again tried to reach the boys market with The Hunchback of Notre Dame I passed because it looked like a bastardization of Victor Hugo’s novel (though I kind of doubt that was the main reason any of the other nine year olds passed on it) and by the time Hercules came out I felt too old for that shit and moved on.  This pattern does seem to jive with the widely held conclusion about boys’ buying habits in this sector. This AP story from 2004 seems to suggest that “Boys are more elusive, in part because they outgrow particular characters more quickly as their attention shifts to sports and other interests.”

The company has certainly found some isolated success in its quest to sell shit to boys.  In their Pixar division they had the Toy Story and Cars franchises (both of which were highly merchandisable, it’s no coincidence that they were the Pixar franchises that got sequels) and a handful of other Pixar films like The Incredibles, but there didn’t really seem to be a united formula that they could really exploit out of them.  They also had some success in the live action division with Pirates of the Carribean and would eventually try to buy their way to a solution by acquiring Marvel and Lucasfilm.  However, as far as Original Recipe Disney went things went a lot less smoothly, in fact many of the company’s woes during the 2000s could be directly attributed to Disney chasing misguided attempts to capture that market.

Their two most notable failed efforts to create masculine action movies out of the Disney Animation formula were Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet, two attempt to movie away from Disney’s usual fairy tale milieu and into science fiction trappings.  It didn’t work.  Boys looking for science fiction action just shifted their attention to real action fare like Star Wars which gave them what they wanted without the stigma of going to a “baby movie.”  Instead of retreating back into princess stuff they just spent the next decade making slightly masculine but ostensibly unisex fare like Home on the Range and Meet the Robinsons while Pixar held fort.  But, as was the case in Princess division, things started to change as we moved out of the aughts and into the teens things started to change.  John Lasseter started to take things over and while he did restart the production of princess stuff, he wasn’t about to give up on making Disney Animation relevant for boys.  From there they started alternating between CGI movies for boys and CGI movies for girls, and while their recent films for boys haven’t been the clear commercial homeruns that their princess movies were they have managed to make some strides where other Disney movies for boys have simply stumbled.

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Being as they are always trying to get in on what’s big with “the kids” Disney has long been somewhat interested in videogames.  Videogames have been made out of Disney properties as far back as the Atari era and today they have their own video game division in Disney Interactive.  The influence has also gone the other way, most noticeably with the interesting-ish 1982 movie Tron.  I think part of the reason Disney has remained so interested in video games is their aforementioned inability to reach the boy market.  Video games have (for better or worse) long been seen as a rather masculine pursuit and up until fairly recently have been seen as toys for children.  The idea, I suppose was to leverage young boy’s interest in video games in order to get them interested in Disney.  Makes sense I guess, and Disney had reportedly been working on another film set inside a videogame way back in the late 1980s under various titles like “High Score,” “Joe Jump,” and “Reboot Ralph” but wouldn’t actually be made until 2013 under the title Wreck-It Ralph.

There is of course one huge obstacle that anyone needs to deal with when trying to appeal to gamers: video game fans are extremely distrustful of outsiders and know a poser when they see one.  I recently read the book “Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation” by Blake J. Harris and remember an anecdote from it where an advertising agency was focus testing a commercial they’d developed for “Sonic the Hedgehog” with the basic premise of taunting the kids’ parents for the fact that they couldn’t get past the fourth level of the game.  To the advertisers’ surprise they were told in no uncertain terms by the gamers that the ad “sucked” in part because they noticed that the footage in the ad wasn’t from the fourth level, it was from the first level.  The takeaway was that it was insulting to the market they were trying to reach that the people putting together the ad couldn’t tell the difference between different levels in the game.  In other words, if you want to reach gamers you damn well better know games and that’s a big part of why it probably took so long to get this movie out of development: they needed to wait for the video game generation to come of age so they could finally have a qualified director.  The director they went with was named Rich Moore, who interestingly was not a homegrown Disney talent but rather someone who came from a geekier branch of the animation world: “The Simpsons” and “Futurama.”

The film is certainly not shy about showing off its gamer bona fieds and fills itself to the brim with references and jokes about actual videogames.  The three main games that the movie focuses on (“Fix-It Felix, Jr.,” “Hero’s Duty,” and “Sugar Rush”) are clear parodies of actual game genres but are none the less fictional.  Just about everything else in the world of the movie, however, is taken from an actual video game.  It’s filled with “cameos” by actual game characters like Bowser, Kano, and Q-Bert and other little Easter eggs like a scene where someone’s password is the famous Konami code.  The thing is, a lot of these references seem to be a bit past their sell-by date and its not all that clear if the people writing this really know much of anything about videogames made after 1992.  That’s no small thing because this film’s target audience consists of people who were, you know, born long after that year.  I’m sure rights issues had something to do with why there weren’t any cameos by modern game characters, but the disconnect does run a little deeper and probably starts with the fact that the movie is ostensibly set at t goddam arcade.  Arcades are dead, like, deader than Blockbuster Video.  You can still find a couple of old cabinets in movie theaters and laundromats I suppose and I’m sure there are a couple of arcades out there serving the retro market but to have kids casually going to a video arcade in 2013 is a little hard to swallow.  There are a couple of other moments that ring false as well, like the fact that “Hero’s Duty” is a full-on First Person Shooter even though those have never been part of the arcade scene (the thing is a light-gun game, those don’t feature hands holding guns onscreen) or the fact that they seem to think that Zangief from “Street Fighter II” is a villain.

I’ve focused mainly on the Videogame reference part of this because, well, that’s kind of the only thing about this movie that’s really interesting.  Below that surface this is at best a really average family movie.  It follows the usual CGI cartoon formula pretty closely: establish a high concept world, send protagonist on a quest, end with an action scene, make sure everyone learns some sappy insincere message about self-acceptance.  Speaking of that message… it’s kind of lost on me.  The movie starts with Ralph being depressed about his role as the bad guy in a videogame and about the stigma that’s been attached to him.  By the end of the movie he’s decided that he should be happy in his role as villain (you know, because he makes life interesting or something) and I guess people have decided to be nicer to him now that he’s saved the day.  What is this a metaphor for and what is its relevance in the real world? Videogames are pretty much the only field in existence where being a villain actually makes things more fun for anyone so I don’t think that has much relevance.  If I’m being really really charitable I suppose that this could be a metaphor for people working in disrespected blue collar jobs, but “be content with your shitty job” isn’t exactly an uplifting message.  I suppose you could say that the film shows how (inadvertently) going on strike for a couple of days can make your employer realize how much they need you and lead to better treatment, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the intended message and if it was that would seem like an odd point to be making in media intended for eight year olds.

Of course there is a more obvious message that emerges in the film’s second half, but that’s kind of a problem of its own.  After a silly but somewhat enjoyable first half where the film goes from video game to video game and reference to reference it suddenly gets bogged down for an hour in a single game cart racing called “Sugar Rush.”  Here he meets a rather annoying side character named Vanellope von Schweetz, who has been ostracized because she glitches.  It’s clearly a disability allegory, it ends with her turning her disability into an asset and proving it’s “alright” to be difference and to accept yourself yada yada yada… it’s pretty standard kid movie stuff but it feels particularly awkward because it doesn’t start until an hour into the movie and kind of feels like a movie within a movie.  From there we’re introduced to a bug infestation that carried over from “Hero’s Duty” (interesting that while Ralph gets to be misunderstood, these bugs are depicted as truly horrible even though they’re both villains) so there can be a climactic battle at the end.

The more non-Pixar family movies I watch the more a lot of them seem kind of the same except with certain superficial differences to give them the illusion of originality.  Wreck it Ralph seems like a good example of this.  The whole video game motif gives the movie a certain amount of flavor but otherwise it’s animated kids’ movie 101.  What’s more, the film feels very decidedly un-Disney.  A few more fart jokes and it would have been virtually indistinguishable from something Dreamworks would have made.  It’s not a bad movie so much as an excessively mediocre one.  With a $189 million domestic gross (plus $281 million international) the movie certainly made money at the box office when it came out in 2012 but it wasn’t a phenomenon.  It was the twelfth highest grossing movie of the year but only the fourth highest grossing animated movie of the year after Pixar’s Brave, Dreamworks’ Madagascar 3, and Universal’s The Lorax.  I suppose Brave has some relevance in pop culture but it is definitely viewed as lesser Pixar and those other two movies were largely dismissed irrelevancies.  That’s Disney’s big effort came in behind this kind of competition showed that they still had a lot of work to do if they wanted to return to being the leader in the field.

Big Hero 6 (2014)

The elephant in the room whenever people talk about Disney trying to reassert their dominance of the boys market is that in many ways the larger Disney corporation already solved their weaknesses in that Market the second they bought Marvel Comic and probably solidified it further when they bought Lucasfilm.  At this point Disney is in many ways only making male skewing animated movies so that their main brand doesn’t get to be so identified with princesses that it comes to be seen as a girly brand like Barbie.  The big question of course was whether or not Disney Animation was ever going to try to take a piece of that Marvel pie or whether they were just going to let Marvel Studios keep doing their own thing.  This was a pretty big predicament because the people at Marvel Studios almost certainly didn’t want another division screwing up one of their marquee characters and even if the Animation division was guaranteed to do a great job they’d still potentially be sidelining a character that could otherwise be used to headline a live action film and fit into the Avengers universe.  Also, they had the added pressure that any CGI animated superhero movie was probably going to have to live in the shadow of Pixar’s The Incredibles.  The solution they eventually reached was to let the animation division make a movie based on a Marvel character but one that was even more obscure than Guardians of the Galaxy and to de-emphasize the properties Marvel origins during the promotion of the film.  In fact, if you look at the film’s trailer you find that it downplays the superhero material almost entirely and sells the film almost entirely as a sort of science fiction/adventure film.

The comic book the film is loosely based on was a minor Marvel title from the late 90s about a group of Japanese superheroes built around a character called The Silver Samurai.  That character (who was depicted in the movie The Wolverine) was the only element of that group I’d heard of and he’s not even in this movie… in fact as far as I can tell very little of this movie was actually taken from the comic book, but that’s not a big deal.  The film is set in a city called San Fransokyo, presumably envisioning some sort of future where trans-Pacific borders have been blurred.  We know from Blade Runner that this fusion of East and West created a dark hellscape in L.A. but Northern California seems to have taken to their Japanese overlords better.  The city looks cool and I also like the sci-fi elements that the filmmakers bring to the table.  The film is set in a world where fourteen year olds can theoretically graduate from college young and be accepted into a group of college aged inventors… yeah, definitely some wish fulfilment there for the kids in the audience, but there’s nothing too wrong with that and I like the way the film makes its child protagonist into something of a streetwise punk at the beginning.  As the movie opens this kid is doing the futuristic equivalent of poolhall hustling, and isn’t really something you’d expect from the usual squeaky clear Disney protagonist.

I was a little less fond of the film’s supporting characters, specifically the rest of the film’s superhero team which are built out of the members of the protagonist’s engineering team.  Normally in movies like this it’s the children who are annoying but, in keeping with the film’s wish fulfillment bent, here it’s the older characters who are kind of insufferable.  There’s the nerd pseudo-stoner named Fred, then there’s Wasabi who is characterized by his general cowardice when faced with the comic book craziness around him, and Honey Lemon who is this sort of neurotic nerd girl and is just generally kind of annoying.  Then of course there’s a character named GoGo, a tough no-nonsense action hero in the middle of an engineering team who frankly just seems like a really strained attempt to wedged a strong female characterTM into a group that is otherwise unable to keep up with a fourteen year old kid.  I was a bit more fond of the robot Baymax, who was nicely able to inject humor into the movie without resorting to the kind of obnoxiousness that usually characterizes comedic sidekicks in family movies.  I also loved the movie’s villain, who just looks incredibly dope wearing all black and sporting a tough looking kabuki mask.  Just one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in an animated family movie.

For much of the film’s runtime it doesn’t really seem to be a superhero movie at all, and I actually kind of wish it had stayed that way.  The superhero material in the movie isn’t terrible exactly but we aren’t really lacking for superhero movies right now and I’m not exactly sure that we needed another one and the superhero elements in this one are a little weak.  I certainly like the way that the animators were able to show light reflecting out of the heroes armor, but otherwise that armor looked kind of lame, they kind of looked like some kind of roller derby team and the stoner dude’s dinosaur looking costume doesn’t really fit that well.  I also found the origin of the group a bit rushed.  The heroes all acclimate to their powers over the course of a single montage which seemingly takes place over an afternoon, which is just way too easy.  That said the actual superhero actions scenes aren’t half bad, at least by animation standards.

Looking back I feel like the big difference between the Disney that gave us Wreck-It Ralph and the Disney that gave us Big Hero 6 is that the former studio was taking a lot of its cues from Dreamworks and the latter studio was getting more of its cues from Pixar.  You can see it right in the voice casting.  The former movie is loaded to the brims with celebrity stunt casting while the biggest names in the latter are Maya Rudolph, James Cromwell (or, “that guy,” as he’s known to the public), and a second generation Wayans Brother.  More importantly the film doesn’t indulge in Dreamworks style obligatory moralizing.  Yeah, there is perhaps some messages to be found in the movie about the correct way to handle grief, and about friendship, and about rising up to your potential, and whatever, but the movie never paints this stuff on too thickly. For the most part it’s content to just be an adventure movie which is probably its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.  The film does remind me a bit of how I felt about the other famous CGI animated superhero movie, The Incredibles, in that I thought it was a pretty well-conceived action movie that nonetheless kind of lacked that additional depth to really push it into the realm of the truly special.

Domestically, Big Hero 6 actually only made about $30 million more than Wreck-It Wralph but it certainly felt like a bigger success.  Part of that might have been that it won the Oscar for Best Animated Film (albeit in a victory that was arguably marred by the surprise omission of The Lego Movie from that year’s list of nominees), another part might be that the movie grossed more than any other animated movie that year aside from the aforementioned The Lego Movie.  Also, the movie was even a bigger success at the international box office where it made close to $200 million more than Wreck-It Ralph but still never got to the point where it was making Frozen money.  Still, $600 million dollars is nothing to scoff at under any circumstances, more importantly the film is an obvious and drastic improvement in quality.  The movie certainly didn’t have quite what it took to function as some sort of Disney classic and also isn’t particularly creative but it executes on a really high level and is pretty damn entertaining.

In Conclusion

The trajectory of these two “Disney for Boys” movies was certainly not unlike the trajectory I noticed when looking at the recent “Disney Princess Movies.”  They put out one rather shaky effort that didn’t do enough to elevate itself from the animated movie pack and another one that felt more like something special.  Of the two “improved efforts” I liked Big Hero 6 more than Frozen but I also get why the latter was a grand slam with the public while the former was more of a ground rule double.  For all its flaws, Frozen felt a lot more in line with the Disney legacy and had a certain gradeur to it because of it which Big Hero 6 lacked.  For all their attempts to encroach on the boys market Disney still hasn’t really established what a Disney film marketed to boys is supposed to look like.  With Wreck-It Ralph they borrowed a lot from Dreamworks, with Big Hero 6 they borrowed from Pixar, but they never really broke the code for how they could bridge the Disney of old with the modern tastes of ten year old boys.  I’m not exactly sure how they could fix that or if they’re even going to try, but I’m sure they’re going to keep experimenting.  Walt Disney Animation studios doesn’t have anything on the docket this year, but they’re planning to put out two movies in 2016, one seemingly directed towards each gender.  The non-princess movie is called Zootopia and has something to do with a city populated by talking animals and the other movie is a musical about the adventures of a Princess in a South Pacific tribe called Moana.  I’d say the latter film sounds a little more promising, but we’ll see.



If you spend any time in some of the hipper left-leaning corners of the internet you know who Amy Schumer is.  To certain websites and constituencies she’s the world’s most important comedian and every episode of her sketch show, “Inside Amy Schumer,” is eagerly dissected and reposted as stories with titles like “Amy Schumer brilliantly skewers [insert patriarchal tendency] in pitch-perfect sketch.”  In truth the show isn’t quite as omnipresently popular as it seems within certain internet bubbles.  Each episode is watched by a little more than half the audience of the average episode of the much derided “Tosh.0” and around a third of the audience of an average episode of “South Park,” but its ability to establish a devoted following within a dedicated niche is impressive.  Personally, I find the show and Schumer’s comedy stylings kind of hit and miss.  Is it over-rated?  Well, how could it not be over-rated given how much hype is behind it?  The show is funny and clever at times but there are certainly better sketch shows out there.  A lot of its appeal is rooted in the fact that most of its humor is related to feminist issues and the more important those issues are to you the more likely you are to worship the show and as someone who views these issues as important but not centrally important I was probably not destined to love the show.  Still, Schumer is clearly a pretty important comedic voice and the idea of her teaming up with comedy super-director/producer Judd Apatow is pretty damn promising.

In Trainwreck Schumer plays a woman named Amy Townsend who works at a GQ-esque men’s magazine called S’nuff Magazine.  At an editorial meeting one of her colleagues (Jon Glaser) proposes a story about a pioneering sports doctor who’s planning to test a new surgery that could cut down players’ recovery time significantly.  Townsend initially dismisses the story because of her blanket bias against all things sports related but her editor Dianna (Tilda Swinton) begins to think that Townsend’s hatred of athletics could bring an interesting dimension to the story and gives her the assignment.  When she goes to interview the doctor, Aaron Conners (Bill Hader), she is initially unfazed by his medical expertise and his friendship with LeBron James (who plays a version of himself) but her interview escalates into a date which turns into a one-night stand.  Oddly smitten by Townsend, Conners makes it known that he wants this relationship to turn into something serious, but Townsend has been living a cavalier life of drunken debauchery up to this point and is not sure she really wants a real truly monogamous relationship.

The film’s title is supposed to refer to the life of its protagonist, but it perhaps seems a bit judgmental given the relatively tame lifestyle depicted in the film.  Sure, Amy Townsend seems to have an above-average number of sexual partners but her liaisons mostly don’t seem wildly reckless or dangerous, and she drinks a lot but decidedly isn’t depicted as a full-blown alcoholic.  She doesn’t seem to use drugs beyond a sporadic toke, she holds a fairly enviable job for most of the film, and starts the film with a doting boyfriend (played by John Cena, of all people).  She’s certainly not a role-model and I wouldn’t necessarily want to switch places with her, but to call her a “trainwreck” seems a bit much.  Shame this is not.  Given that this is meant to be a comedy that may well have been an understandable decision, but just the same I can’t help but feel like the movie is kind of posing as something edgier than it actually is.

The film does not place feminist gender issues front and center the way that Schumer’s TV series does but I do think there’s an implicit statement being attempted in the way the film swaps traditional romantic comedy roles.  Traditionally these modern romantic comedies are about slovenly but charming men overcoming their inhibitions and bettering themselves in order to win over the beautiful leading woman looking for stability.  Here it’s the woman with the dumpy bachelor lifestyle who must better herself and win over the straight laced man who seems to be looking for domestic stability.  Bill Hader is probably not a handsome lead who could be called the male equivalent of a Julia Roberts or Katherine Heigl but otherwise the romcom subversion does seem to be pretty consistent.  The gender swaps work fairly well when done on a macro level as described above but it begins to feel a little forced and cutesy when it comes to some of the individual scenes forcing the characters to behave in ways that are un-stereotypical in unbelievable extremes like one scene where Schumer receives a call from Hader the morning after their initial hook-up and along with her friend acts with masculine incredulousness at the gesture while Hader and LeBron James are on the other end of the call giggling like schoolgirls.

And make no mistake; this is a fairly formulaic romantic comedy at its core.  It doesn’t flaunt this to the point of being a parody, but there’s a misunderstanding separating the couple at exactly the point you expect there to be one which is resolved in typical romcom fashion with a grand gesture.  It hides its genre trappings fairly well early on but in its third act it does indulge in this formula and in ways that feel more like cliché than like subversion.  The film also feels like it could stand to be trimmed a little.  Judd Apatow movies have long been accused of being too long, which I generally haven’t felt was the problem that others did but I did feel it a little bit here, in part because it seems a bit more like it’s following a set formula than Knocked Up and The 40-Year-Old Virgin did.  All told I would say that on every structural level this film is kind of flawed.

That having been said, there’s a lot of funny stuff here.  A lot.  Like, more than enough to make up for most of the movie’s shortcomings.  We’ve seen women try to do Apatow-esque humor before with varying degrees of success before but it seems to work a lot better here.  This might simply be because Apatow himself is behind the director’s chair rather than Paul Feig, but it probably has more to do with the fact that Amy Schumer is closer to being a female Seth Rogen than Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy do.  She does a good job bringing the improvised funny lines and so do most of her co-stars.  The movie makes great use of B-tier comedic actors like Colin Quinn, Brie Larson, and Randall Park and also manages to get some surprisingly credible comedy out of non-actors like LeBron James and John Cena.  I would say that Bill Hader is perhaps a bit wasted in his largely straight role, on Saturday Night Live he always thrived when he was doing impressions taking on strange comedic characters and his doctor character here doesn’t really play to those strengths.

So, what to make of Trainwreck… this is kind of a tough one to call.  I certainly like it, but how much do I like it?  Let’s just say that the film’s shortcomings were more apparent to me after it was over than they were while I was actually watching it.  The movie works a lot better moment to moment than it does as a complete work, but I don’t want to exaggerate its structural flaws either.  There are a lot of comedies that are a lot more ramshackle than this and while the Judd Apatow comedy structure might seem a little less special now than it did ten years ago, you can still tell why his movies feel a bit easier to respect than some of the less grounded varieties of comedy.  For whatever flaws the film may have had, I can’t help but say “yeah, but I was laughing at a lot of stuff.”

***1/2 out of Four



As sure as the seasons change and the sun rises, popular music genres will almost always shift and sway.  Jazz gave way to rock, rock gave way to hip hop, and it looks increasingly like hip hop is in decline today.  Make no mistake, Eminem and Jay-Z aren’t going anywhere but when I look at the mainstream rap scene I see a lot to worry about.  Honestly the whole genre kind of feels like it’s about to get stuck in a rut in much the same way mainsteam rock stagnated after the demise of gunge and the rise of the Nickelbacks of the world.  The big question is “what music is going to fill that void?” and increasingly the answer seems to be EDM (Electronic Dance Music).  EDM hasn’t really become a radio format and we’re still not quite at a point where someone like Deadmau5 can just put one of his noisy instrumental tracks out and get massive radio airplay, but by collaborating with pop singers DJs have become a commercial force to be reckoned with. At this very moment Skrillix, Diplo, David Guetta, and DJ Snake are all in the Billboard top 20 and other EDM DJs like Calvin Harris and Avicii have had monumental hits as of late, not to mention Daft Punk’s massive Grammy winning comeback album “Random Access Memories” two years ago.  One could easily make the mistake of thinking this music just came out of nowhere, but that obviously isn’t the case.  This is a genre that has had a long history, and the new movie Eden seeks to explore one aspect of that history.

The film begins in the early 90s in Paris where a young man named Paul (Félix de Givry) is attending a party at a club when he and another electronic music enthusiast named Stan (Hugo Conzelmann) decide to form a Garage duo called “Cheers,” setting off two decades of up and down success in the Paris club scene.  The film follows Paul as he establishes his niche following in Paris, briefly tours New York and Chicago, only to eventually find the toll of years in the clubs take their toll on him.  Women come in and out of his life, he dabbles in drugs, and his relationship with his family becomes increasingly rocky as he pursues his dream.

Going into the film I had thought that I was a little more knowledgeable about EDM than the average person because I had some Daft Punk and Moby on my iPod, but it quickly became apparent just how much of a neophyte I was about the music, especially once I realized that I had no idea what the difference between Garage and House music was.  Unfortunately I don’t think the movie did a whole lot to make me understand or really connect with the music on a deeper level.  In fact it kind of failed to really establish what goes into being a DJ.  We certainly see a number of shots of Paul setting records on turntables and slowly moving them in semi-circles before letting it play, but it’s not overly clear how much he’s altering and re-mixing the songs while at the DJ table and it’s never overly clear what “Cheers” is doing to advance the scene.  If the film had been about a struggling rock band or folk singer rather than a DJ I doubt that the narrative or even the flavor of the film would have been all that different.

The movie’s bigger sin though is that it’s a character study about a character just that didn’t strike me as a wildly interesting subject.  I’m sure there’s a certain truth to the way the film depicts Paul’s rise to low level local fame and eventual self-destruction, but the film didn’t really do a whole lot to argue for the story’s importance.  Part of this may have been Félix de Givry’s performance, which struck me as rather bland and the film didn’t do a great job of aging the character over the course of the film’s twenty year span (though I’m not unsympathetic with the challenges of conveying the subtle aging process that people go through between the ages of 16 and 36 through makeup).  I feel like a rise and fall narrative like this could have been made more impactful if it had been told with the energy and style of something like Boogie Nights or perhaps with the melancholy of something like Inside Llewyn Davis but Mia Hansen-Løve shoots the film in a rather disappointingly understated way that never really propels the story.  The film definitely has interesting moments but as a whole it just doesn’t really justify itself.

** out of Four